The "Über Lebenskunst" project is turning the city of Berlin into a showcase for initiatives that bring together culture and sustainability and examine (brand) new models for action. Whether neighborhood gardens, urban beekeepers, carrot mobs, Wiki woods, sewing cafés or climate pirates on the Berlin’s Spree River - the Call for Future is directed at everyone who wants to come up with ideas both in and for Berlin.

Migrating Gardens is a collaborative project by Oda Projesi and Nis Rømer reflecting on the relation of micro-scale farming and migration. It is an investigation of why people move from one environment to another and how they manifest themselves in the city with their practices/professions from where they come from.
It takes place in the whole of October, with events, cycling tours and a free news paper that you can download here.

Brings together speakers from art and (counter) culture, architecture, urbanism, and media technology to discuss such questions as: In what way is the city not a fixed entity, but a process? How do artists and cultural activists reclaim the street, activating the city as backdrop and insisting on public space? What makes a city a city? Who owns the city? How can media technology be designed to intervene in and navigate the city?

"Founded in 2006 the Studio for Urban Projects is a research and working group that perceives art as a means of advancing civic engagement and furthering public dialogue. Their interdisciplinary, collaborative, and research-based projects aim to provoke change by reframing our perceptions of the city and physically transforming elements of the built environment.

SUP recently opened a storefront in the San Francisco Mission District. It is best described as a “collective of collectives”, a place where like-minded San Francisco art collaboratives share a space for the staging of talks, film screenings, workshops, discussions, and meals."

C.R.A.S.H - A Postcapitalist A to Z brings permaculturists and activists, artists and young precarious/unemployed workers together to share skills for resistance and self-resilience in a time of economic and ecological collapse.

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination is a network of socially engaged artists and activists whose work falls in between resistance and creativity, culture and politics, art and life. We are inviting creative resisters, unemployed workers and art activists to take part in our latest project - C.R.A.S.H: A post capitalist A to Z - in London’s financial district in June 2009.

A group of activists and organizers, including Red Emma's, the Indypendent Reader, The Baltimore Development Cooperative, campbaltimore, and the Campaign for a Better Baltimore are calling for a conference called The City From Below, to take place in Baltimore at 2640, a grassroots community center and events venue.

"The city has emerged in recent years as an indispensable concept for many of the struggles for social justice we are all engaged in - it's a place where theory meets practice, where the neighborhood organizes against global capitalism, where unequal divisions based on race and class can be mapped out block by block and contested, where the micropolitics of gender and sexual orientation are subject to metropolitan rearticulation, where every corner is a potential site of resistance and every vacant lot a commons to be reclaimed, and, most importantly, a place where all our diverse struggles and strategies have a chance of coming together into something greater. In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being, hidden histories and herstories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink the city from below."

Take Back the Land has been liberating public and foreclosed land and homes since 2006-- occupying foreclosed homes and moving people into these places!!

"It is immoral to maintain vacant homes for the purpose of profits in the future, while human beings are forced to live on the street today. The madness of such a policy is only compounded when one considers the owners of these vacant homes are not other people, but banks, the same banks receiving billions of dollars in bailouts without having to trade in the foreclosed homes for use by some of the people financing the bailouts. Additional government resources, including police and other government agencies, should not be used to evict low income people from homes in order to maintain vacant structures for bailed out banks to profit from some time in the future."

"The work of Vito Acconci (b. 1940) deals with critical, now and then even playful aspects of identity politics – the ‘self’ as a social construct – and is characterized by self-motivated research into the relationship between artist and viewer, how individual and social space are related to one another. The extensive exhibition offers an insight into the practice that this influential artist carried-out in the 1970s, from the perspective of the role of language as a catalyzing impulse. This is thereby the center of gravity shaping Acconci’s conceptual, performance-based videos and audio works, wherein he executes an intense dialogue between his body and psyche, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, the public and private space, in the form of stream-of-consciousness monologues. This historic, groundbreaking body of work, distinguished by an unusually psychodramatic intensity, is supplemented in this exhibition by graphic transcriptions of audio works and early poetry works. In these works the physical materialization of language is central, achieved through means of syntactical experiments and typographical permutations."

A collection of diverse volunteers who live, work or study in Cambridge team up in pairs to discuss their city. They cut, core and peel apples to reflect the forces that shape Cambridge and it’s residents. The exhibition, at The Shop, presents the results of this community collaboration.

India Resource Center works to support movements against corporate globalization in India. They provide timely information on transnational corporations to Indian movements and educate and mobilize key constituencies in the US and other countries to take action in support of campaigns in India.

Oslo (November 11, 2008): Students at the University of Oslo have voted overwhelmingly to restrict the dominant presence of Coca-Cola products on campus, and introduce ethical alternatives to Coca-Cola on campus.

LE GRAND MAGASIN is the title of a store opening in October 2008 in Berlin. The store and exhibition will display and sell products from European cooperatives. It will provide a forum and raise consciousness about products promoting solidarity and alternative types of doing business and manufacturing.
The Project is made by artist Andreas Wegner and will be an exiting exploration and display of workers owned businesses and area that has been little explored in a European context.

The majority of contemporary art production comes from urban centres where the density of funding and institution is the highest. This also makes for a perception of what is not city as "other" and only rarely does experiences and knowledge produced and rooted in a countryside find its way into the artistic discussions. Sørfinnset skole/ the nord land is unique in this respect. It is situated in Sørfinnset a town with 80 inhabitants in the municipality of Gildeskål, Norway. It is a former school that has now become the base for a whole range of activities and exchange between local and international art and culture.

Sørfinnset skole / the nord land is an ongoing project started in 2003 by the artists; Søssa Jørgensen & Geir Tore Holm (N), Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert (Th) as a part of the public arts program Art in Nordland. It is a parallel to "the land" in Thailand: An artist driven ecological rice farm, school and selforganized commune established by Kamin Lertchaiprasert og Rirkrit Tiravanija in 1998.

The Art in Nordland program is supporting the project with no end date. This makes sense because as Søssa and Geir state: "Changes happen slowly in nature and in social and cultural processes alike, which is why we have involved ourselves in a long term relation to this place"

The school and its related plot of land is situated close to the water and just above the Arctic Circle, meaning days without nights in summer and the reversed in winter. Traditionally this was a farming and fishing community. Also being this far north you find influences of Sami culture; a nomadic people traditionally living of reindeer, travelling across borders between northern Norway, Sweden and Finland.

These conditions, and the fact that Geir has Sami roots have lead Søssa and Geir to work with Sami culture. In 2005 a course was made for building a "Goathi" (a Sami dwelling) with the master of Sami craft: Jon Ole Andersen and they have continued making projects on Sami history, building customs and food. The same year they started building the Thai house. The building was started in collaboration with 10 Thai students from the Land together with local craftsmen, people from the area and people coming to help from elsewhere. The construction has continued up until today and was just finished on the 3rd of August 2008 ready for use by international visitors and local wanderers.

The Sørfinnset skole / the nord land makes a strong case that hospitality and international exchange can be the foundation for another form of globalization actualized in a specific place and community. In this respect it is more than a project where everyday life and art is closely linked; it also points to how the specificity of the the land and local culture, in meeting with another kind of culture can transform places into a new kind of particularity; a place like no other.

The artist initiated group called Grow Sheffield, in collaboration with Access Space, is seeking contributions for a magazine called Collaborative Cultures to be published this autumn. The issue will reflect a theme which connects the activities of Access Space to the wider world.

They are looking for pieces of COMMONSense: prose (stories, thoughts, book reviews, bibliographies...), poetry, songs, pieces of code, photographs, cartoons, drawings, graphics or anything else you can think of. These might approach the theme in relation to green issues, land ownership, social relations, the internet, the music industry, copyright, software, or anything else that makes sense to you.

From September 17th to 21st 2008 the European Social Forum (ESF) is being held in Malmö, in the south of Sweden. The forum is by far the biggest meeting place for social movements and a progressive civil society in Europe - with the aim to create a better Europe and a better world. More than 20 000 people are expected to participate in Malmö. During five days over 200 seminars and workshops will be mixed with even more culture, film, music, informal meetings, activism and demonstrations.

10,000 Steps is a unique collaboration between marksearch (Sue Mark and Bruce Douglas), an independent artistic cultural research team, and the Friends of Oakland Parks and Recreation. In this two-year stewardship project, the artists are working with neighbors and community groups that surround four historic parks in downtown Oakland – Jefferson, Lafayette, Lincoln and Madison Square Parks – to beautify and draw attention to green urban public space.

The team has co-hosted many park greening events in and around the parks: clean-ups, picnics, and community gardening. Future events include the creation of butterfly gardens in Madison and Lincoln Square Parks as well as a youth bench-building project at the Lincoln Rec Center.

In 2008, Amsterdam hosts its first edition of the Biennale, from 18 September to 2 November, under the theme Space and Place – Design for the Urban Landscape.

ExperimentaDesign Amsterdam 2008 highlights urban culture as the playground for the global citizen. The world’s cities are not only home to over half of the world’s population, they are also a metaphor for today’s cultures and a testing ground for new forms of conviviality and interaction. Throughout its three core exhibitions, the Biennale turns the spotlight on innovative urban design as a process of social action, exchanges and experiment.

Futurefarmers in collaboration with the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum will host two building workshops and 4 discussion sessions led by scientists from the University of Chicago. The general public will be invited to participate in discussions with the guests in the Energy Tent.

The magazine AREA Chicago is out with a new issue all available online. Its a Local Reader on Experimental Policies on the Ground in Chicago. Co-edited by Aaron Sarver, Daniel Tucker and Micah Maidenberg.

On June 5,6 and 7, we will present a bus tour, an outdoor film/video festival and an on-site exchange in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California.

This tour takes inspiration from the spirit of counter cultural activities prevalent in this region in the late 1960’s, namely the activities of the Mid-Peninsula Free University, Homebrew Computer Club,draft-resisters and the back-to-landers.

The local landscape will provide a campus for our roaming classroom. The bus will traverse the Santa Clara Valley using public facilities, nature preserves and back alleys to host projects by a wide range of practitioners. We will use this free campus to explore, discover and generate critical responses to the pressing issues that affect not only ourselves, but our whole round planet.

A Free Soil reader will be published alongside this project that looks at various forms of education as cultural production and creative resistance.

In anticipation of the next “official” Viva! Action Art event planned for 2009, six artist-run centres from the Montréal region are staging a “Mini” Viva!. Loosely organised around performative projects taking place this spring at La Centrale, Dare-Dare, articule, Skol, Praxis and Clark, this edition of Viva! derives its theme from a performance and workshop entitled Performance & Activism in Everyday Life presented by La Centrale, which aims to provide a space for the sharing of tactics and stories amongst peer artists. Viva!, in many respects, shares this collaborative spirit by providing a space for like-minded centres to share dissemination tactics for art practices that might not be as visible. Artists featured include Kerri Reid as well as the launch of Livraison #9, As if all were well with Stephen Wright et al. (Skol), Andrew Chartier (Praxis), Andrea Cavagnaro (Dare-Dare), The Black Market Type & Print Shop (curator: Joseph Del Pesco) and Michael Toppings (articule), Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Lori Blondeau & Adrian Stimson (La Centrale – curator: Joanne Bristol), an exhibition organised by Ayesha Hameed, Nahed Mansour, Tatiana Gomez and Leila Pourtavaf (La Centrale), and an open studio event with nearly 100 artists (Clark).

In 2009 the Austrian Festival of Regions will be oriented toward the southern edge of the city of Linz, along the Traun River, with a focus on the satellite town of Auwiesen and the residential complexes of solarCity, an integrated solar village.

From Allende Square to Luna Square, beyond the inner urban orientation toward concentration, commercial use and entertainment, and at a certain safe distance from the cultural spectacles propagated on all sides, the Festival of Regions is interested in the factual or imagined state of normality in urban life and in seeking out its cultural expressions.

The University of California Santa Cruz will host a three-day conference and month long series of interventionist exhibitions in May 2008. A series of exhibitions featuring the work of participating artists will run concurrently with the conference, hosted by: the Art department and the Sesnon Gallery at UCSC; the LAB, San Francisco; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose. Interruptions will foster exchange between scholars, innovative regional and international artists and curators, through panel presentations, performances and indoor and outdoor exhibitions. There will be a Wikipedia dedicated to real-time collaboration and exchange between participants. The conference will generate a publication documenting the scholarly and artistic work emerging from this event.

Border Film Project is an art collaborative that distributed disposable cameras to two groups on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border - undocumented migrants crossing the desert and American Minutemen trying to stop them.

RadicalMath is a resource for educators interested in integrating issues of social and economic injustice into their math classes and curriculum. On this website you will find links to access and download over 700 lesson plans, articles, charts, graphs, data sets, maps, books, and websites to help you bring these issues into your classroom.

"A school with no curriculum, located underneath TELIC Arts Exchange, a non-profit organization that provides a place for multiple publics to engage with contemporary forms of media, art and architecture. For four years the space has been a platform for exhibitions, performances, screenings, lectures and discussions. TELIC’s program emphasizes social exchange, interactivity and public participation to produce a critical engagement with new media and culture.

The Public School operates as follows: first, classes are proposed by the public (I want to learn this or I want to teach that); then, people have the opportunity to sign up for the classes (I also want to learn that); finally, when enough people have expressed interest, the school will find a teacher and offer the class to those who signed up."

March 13 - 14, 2008
A two-day symposium at Pasadena City College, "Anytime, Anyplace," will examine artists' collectives that focus on political, social, and environmental issues and their strategies for engaging individuals and communities.

Keynote speaker for the event will be Grant Kester, critic and associate professor of art history at UCSD. Kester's current book project is "The One and the Many: Agency and Identity in Contemporary Collaborative Art."

Representatives from three art collectives will make presentations:

o Chicago-based Temporary Services, a group of three artists, produces creative exhibitions, events, projects and publications aimed at creating socially dynamic situations and spaces for dialogue. The artists are Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer.

o Futurefarmers, a San Francisco-based inter-disciplinary collective internationally known for a practice that extends across conventional artistic categories. Futurefarmers will begin a week as artist-in-residence at the college at the close of the symposium. Their exhibition "The Reverse Ark: The Flotsam & The Jetsam," will open in the PCC art gallery on Friday evening.

o Temporary Travel Office is Ryan Griffis, who teaches new media art at the University of Illinois, with Sarah Ross, an artist whose works focus on myths of health, safety and cleanliness that surface in the physical and visual structures of everyday space. The final session of the symposium will be a tour with Temporary Travel Office to sites of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

The School of Panamerican Unrest is an artist-led, not-for -profit public art project that seeks to generate connections between the different regions of the Americas through discussions, performances, screenings, and short-term and long-term collaborations between organizations and individuals. Its main component will be a nomadic forum or think-tank that will cross the hemisphere by land, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina, in Tierra del Fuego. This hybrid project included a collapsible and movable architectural structure in the form of a schoolhouse, as well as a video collection component.

A journey through the history + currents of free education, counter-institutional movements + the economy of information in Silicon Valley + beyond.

San Francisco

Free Soil is organizing a bus tour, outdoor film/video festival and on-site exchange, in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California June 5-7, 2008

We are seeking submissions to include in this project. Please visit the links below to learn more about the projects and submission guidelines.

EYFA (European Youth For Action) developed from a tour that was initiated by a Swedish/German group in 1986 to save the old forests in Europe: then named European Youth Forest Action. From these 'routes', it developed into a platform for grassroots movements working to transform local and international communities in their approach to environment and social, political and economical positions.

"Our main aim is to encourage people's initiative and autonomy; people feeling empowered to act and to raise their voices in decision making processes that effect their lives. We promote and use consensus decision-making processes, whereby information is openly shared and decisions are only made when everyone can agree. As a social and information network we share information, resources and skills to achieve better solutions while building community based on trust. Socially sustainable and just communities go hand in hand with environmentally sound ways of living. Our environmentalist perspective is based on the understanding that most environmental problems are also a question of social and economic injustice. EYFA works to challenge the current dominant social and economic system, while creating new methods based on social and environmental sustainability."

The Urban fringe Pharmacy Project is primarily designed to promote healthier lifestyles for the whole community.

Traditionally the types of walks and workshops that they facilitate may be found at National Trust, English Heritage, or other 'middle class' green spaces. Thier open, accessible, and friendly events are held in inner city and urban fringe green spaces and parks, near to bus routes and areas of urban population. We aim to give participants the opportunity to receive expert guidance in a way that is not currently available.

Floating Lab Collective is a group of metropolitan DC-based artists working collectively on performances, media art and research. A recent project, Protesting on Demand, attempts to institutionalize the act of protesting, which normally is something that is very fluid and improvised (in its choreographic sense). In this collective performance the act of protesting becomes serialized, and aesthetisized through a series of actions.

In the course of the summer (2007) the Public Picnic project developed with the help of neighbours, friends and people passing by. A plot in Nørrebro, Copenhagen was temporarily appropriated and turned into a public garden and a hub for a series of public events.
The plot had been hidden behind a fence for years but showed to be quite remarkable; wild berries en mass, apple trees, weeds high enough for a full grown person to disappear into and overall a vast diversity of plants.

The early allotment gardens in Denmark were connected to the workers movement and thus had a political component. Many workers got access to a plot of land away from overpopulated cities and small apartments. Access to land was especially 100 years ago a deeply democratic spatial project, as well as about having places for leisure and retreat from working life. Today it is harder to spot the project in the allotments and it seems there is a need to define what are the spatial rights worth fighting for now?

An attempted answer could be that we need spaces free from the omnipresent regime of disciplining by media and commerce and institutions telling us how to live our lives, how to look, act and feel. Places where the collective is possible, where there is no division between production and play, between pleasure and politics; places for the life-world.

The Public Picnic project was motivated in wanting to act and think on how gardens can have a renewed relevance in urban life and politics. While gardens often are private retreats we wanted this to be a public space for pleasure and production. We trampled some new paths in the weed to open it up. Rosa Marie Frang shouted out the news that television wants us to believe is reality mocking the fiction and creating a new one. Media reality is a farce, and we refuse to reduce our thinking. Shaking the earth in series of events to make geographies or moments where opposites normally fixed can meet, exchange and in the process transform us and the categories themselves.

This is the spaces we want, spaces in out neighbourhood where we can meet, organize and express ourselves in informal ways. It is a modest demand: inclusive spaces free of commercials, self organized urban free spaces where we live, everywhere.

Project Compost is a student-run, student-funded unit of the Associated Students of the University of California, Davis (ASUCD). Four student staff members, many interns, and even more wonderful volunteers cooperatively manage Project Compost.

There are 2 parts to Project Compost: Education and Action
The Education portion means we offer free composting workshops through the Experimental College, make presentations to clubs and classrooms, as well as make home compost consulatations and construct compost bins to give away.

The Action portion of the program consists of compost pickups. Each and everyday we collect over 1,000 pounds of food matter from the Dining Commons (Tercero, Segundo, Oxford Circle, and Castilian), ASUCD Coffee House, Coffee Kiosks on campus, the Pomology Department, the Greenhouse, and several labs on campus. This organic matter is composted by Project Compost on the Student Farm in windrows.

If I Can’t Dance… is a rolling curatorial project based on performative practices, which departs from a spirit of open questioning and a long term enquiry with artists.
It explores how feminist thinking on all levels (social, artistic, political, theoretical, ideological or structural) is important to our cultural life.

At the initiative of bolwerK in Antwerp, we are issuing
a call for reactions to this quote by Emma Goldman in the form of a visual contribution. These will be screened at a mobile “video speakers corner”, Thursday evening, 6 December, during the Antwerp Nocturne on several public buildings.

The ‘Cultures of Economies Research Group’ is a forum at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and professional schools to engage with critical debates about the role of culture, space, and economy. The Research Group seeks to contribute to inter-disciplinary dialogues about the practices of economy in everyday life through regular faculty and graduate student workshops, research paper presentations, reading groups, and an annual symposium.

Queen Victoria School, a small inner-city elementary school on Vancouver's east side, recently completed an extensive, school-wide, interdisciplinary study of water. An original musical play about water, written by the children with the help of teachers and artists in residence, came next. The play was a major success and proved to be a catalyst that made the children aware of issues surrounding water on a global level. As a result of this process, the idea of raising funds to help build a well in Africa was born.

"A Freeconomy is a moneyless society in which no money changes and there is no duality between giving and receiving; here they are seen as the two sides of the same non-monetary coin.

Freeconomy is about sharing the skills you've learnt throughout your life and learning those you haven't. It's about helping others and providing an opportunity for others to help you. Freeconomy allows people to make the transition from a money based communityless society to more of a community based moneyless society, and to share the land they don't need or can't use to facilitate a local food community."

Art & Research is new, artist-led internationally peer assessed journal which welcomes submissions from artists, researchers, academics, critics and curators which seek to engage with all areas of research in Fine Art practice and/or pedagogy.

The Walking Project is a performance, mapping and cultural exchange project collaboratively developed with US and South Africa-based artists during a series of residencies in Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal from 2003 through 2006.

The project explores ‘desire lines’ or paths made by people who walk across fields in South Africa and across vacant lots in Detroit – and what connects them. The Walking Project has expanded to include new ways to facilitate community storytelling through mapping and neighborhood development workshops that start with local walks.

Habitat International Coalition (HIC) is an independent, international, non-profit alliance of some 400 organizations and individuals working in the area of human settlements. The strength of the Coalition is based on its worldwide membership that includes social movements, grassroot organizations, civil society organizations, NGOs, academia and research institutions, and like-minded individuals from 80 countries in both North and South. A shared set of objectives bind and shape HIC's commitment to communities working to secure housing and improve their habitat conditions.

The Community Arts Network (CAN) supports the belief that the arts are an integral part of a healthy culture, providing both intellectual nourishment and social benefit, and that community-based arts provide significant value both to communities and artists.

CAN is promoting information exchange, research and critical dialogue within the field of community-based art

"Cultural researchers Sue Mark and Bruce Douglas, aka marksearch, recently completed a month-long adventure in the Black Belt region of the rural South. Through an unconventional form of ecotourism, marksearch endeavored to explore the local history, current concerns, and sense of community of the residents of one small city: York (population: 3,000). As the CAlabama Peddlers, marksearch, on tandem bike, covered over two hundred miles in Sumter County, Alabama. GPS routes, video, images and text of this amazing journey can all be found on their site.

marksearch is an independent artistic cultural research team that has collaborated on community-based art projects since 2000. Their mission is to create interactive projects that invite people to reflect upon their local communities, consider healthy alternatives to driving, and increase awareness of the natural environment within the urban fabric."

The Stockyard Institute will initiate an interactive exhibition using the Hyde Park Art Center as a site to critically explore the intersection between art, education, and the city. Working with other artists, collaboratives, and groups, such as The Center for Urban Pedagogy (New York), rum46 (Denmark), Think Tank (Philadelphia), Artlink (UK), and AREA Chicago Art, Research, Education & Activism (Chicago), to name a few, the Stockyard Institute will transform the gallery space into a temporary factory that will design and implement an extensive series of programs and events throughout the two month project.

Pedagogical Factory will interrogate the overlap between education, economics, art, and activism, creating a venue to explore alternatives to traditional notions of education and social art.

The Feral Trade Courier is a live shipping database for a freight network running outside commercial systems.

"Feral Trade forges new, wild trade routes across hybrid territories of business, art and social interaction. Goods are run along social routes, avoiding official channels of grocery distribution in preference for a hand-carried cargo system, often using other artists or curators as mules."

La Lleca - means "la calle" (the street) is a slang word used by prisoners in penitetiaries in Mexico City.

La Lleca is more than a critique of the prison system in Mexico. It attempts to generate knowledge that is linked to and that has an effect on our lives.

The aim of the project is not artistic production per se; rather the project is what we term a “social intervention”—meaning that it attempts to change the institutional space a specific prison in Mexico City, its functioning, and the power relations that structure it both on a micro- and macro-level, while, at the same time, providing a physical and psyche space for the development of various workshops, relationships, and projects in collaboration with members of La Lleca.

The exhibition traces the theories of the Situationist International in contemporary architecture and urbanism. INSTANT URBANISM creates a conceptual link with the historical show on the Situationist International at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, by drawing upon the radical propositions made by the Situationists with relation to transforming architecture and city spaces.
With a documentation of interventions and actions within urban and public spaces of the city, INSTANT URBANISM brings together the work of Lucy Orta (France), Santiago Cirugeda (Spain), EXYZT (France), Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (Belgrade, Basel), NL architects (Netherlands) IAN+ (Italy), PPAG (Austria), amongst others.

A series of international arts exchange projects, focusing on the Philippines, Mexico, and California. Taking the historic Acapulco-Manila galleon route as its metaphor of origin, these exhibitions seek to create new routes of cultural exchange along old routes of commerce and trade and will facilitate further discussions between artists, curators, gallerists and scholars from all 3 places to explore strategies for sustainable exchange.

A workshop for cultural practitioners working with modes of self-empowerment and sustainability. With this project, we will gather people who work with an awareness of how the shaping of livelihoods reflects political, economical and cultural power structures, and who, through engagement in this subject, have developed positions and strategies of criticality within their praxis. Participants from Thailand, India, England, Norway, Germany, Scandinavia and others. The workshop is held in Sparwasser, Berlin. It is open to the public. Organized by Åsa Sonjasdotter, Ulrike Solbrig and Nis Rømer

And more summer readings from the Transversal web journal:
"The articles in this issue of the web journal link these new universalism debates with an analysis of specific examples, such as the Zapatist fight for liberation under the motto “Everything for everyone!”, the movement of the French intermittents, the revolutionary battles of the 18th century in San Domingo/Haiti, or feminist politics of friendship."

Artist Jennifer Delos Reyes is the conceptual director of this innovative art project that will combine exhibitions and events with a conference about contemporary art issues. For this event, Regina will host over 70 national and international artists. A keynote address will be given by Harrell Fletcher whose internationally renowned work has helped to expand the notions of socially based art practices for over a decade.

Ephemera is an electronic forum for developing and extending discussions of critical perspectives on organization. It is transdisciplinary and encourages contributions from a broad spectrum of academics, researchers, activists, practitioners, employees and other members of organizations.

For one night only, Caroline Cloak and Lissa Ivy Tiegel [arborists] invite you to climb a branch ladder to our treehouse rejuvenation station.

Entry to the treehouse will be limited to coupon-holders due to constraints of time and space. Each party of 2-3 will be welcome for a 10 minute stay, including a customized sandwich. Coupons forthcoming.

Hours of Treehouse operation: 7-8pm; 9-11pm; 12-1:05am.

UNCANNY
The treehouse is part of a lively one night outdoor art party featuring interactive, installation and performance art, DJs, live music and food under a full moon. Uncanny is put on by students at UCDavis, this year at an organic farm and vineyard with access to Putah Creek.

A texts from 1970 that reflects on working in groups and collectives with a loose structure.
It builds on practical experiences from especially women's liberation movement and ends by suggesting principles for democratic structuring. Relevant reflections for today's collaborative practices as well.

Last week while I was in Barcleona, I had the good fortune of meeting up with a friend who offered to host me for a day. I asked if there were any urban garden projects going on, and the next day we were on the subway leading to the outskirts of town, walking up a dirt road into the valley of San Genis to Can Masdeu.

A winding dirt road lead us to a cluster of hand painted signposts and bulletin boards framing a view of arcadia"

Can Masdeu is a squatted social centre in one of the last non-urbanized valleys, San Genis, part of the Collserola National Park in Barcelona. It was squatted by an international group of activists in December 2001, and the terraces surrounding the masia (country mansion) are cultivated by neighbors who live in the neighborhood below, Nou Barris. It sits on 49.4 acres of land. Parts of the masia were built in the 1600s, and in the early 20th century and the house was a nunnery and leper hospital. Surrounding the mansion are terraced gardens that provide food for the entire community. Sections of the land are community gardens dedicated to the neighbors. These are broken up into small plots separated by bamboo fencing.

Can Masdeu gained international attention in April 2002, when over 100 national police came to evict 11 squatters defending the house in positions of passive resistance. Unable to remove the squatters from lockdowns, tripods, on ropes and planks extended out of windows, and even a hanging bathtub, the police waited for the squatters to get thirsty and hungry and come down. After three days of media attention, hundreds of protesting onlookers chanting slogans and stopping traffic on the local highway, and even a solidarity group organizing a sit-in in the Spanish Embassy in Holland, the judge ordered the police to leave and the case reopened. Later rulings favored the owner, the Hospital of San Pau, but no eviction notice has been given.

The project includes a bakery, pizza oven, bike kitchen, cafe, and a social center, the PIC, or Punt d'Interracció de Collserola, which opens Sundays to the public and offers a variety of activities and workshops, often related to environmental issues, permaculture and organic farming, communal living, and community autonomy.

The PIC and the rurbar, a cafe serving local and organic meals and drinks, is open most Sundays from noon until evening. Activities are listed on the website and in the newsletter Infousurpa.

As of 2007, more than 28 people live in and share the house. Community participation includes bi-weekly meetings, organic gardening, housework, and two collective meals per day, and each member contributes roughly 25 euros/month to food costs. The working languages of the house are Catalan and Spanish, but as it is an international group, English, Italian, French, Basque, and Esperanto are also spoken.

Upon entering the main courtyard, we were greeted by a table of people enjoying a community lunch including fresh baked bread and several dishes of food from their gardens. We happened to arrive on a Friday which is the baking day.

After wandering around the grounds and leafing through their extensive zine and radical left library for over 2 hours, it became very clear that Can Masdeu was organizing beyond the local community and that it had become an important link in an international network of social organizations and movement carrying genuine social ecological and political value;
many of its residents have participated in broader social struggles, including the demonstration for a "New Culture of Water" against the Damming of the Ebre River, and the Campaign Against the Europe of Capital and the War.

One aspect of this community that seemed to be the glue of its efficiency and survival was the distribution of responsibilites. The group works in a very open way, such that they make sure that people who have specific skills pass them on to other people. In the case of doing renovation work, they might run a workshop so that when they repair or develop something, they can also teach a group of people as they go along. It seems that skill sharing and rotating roles is essential, such that if one system fails, more than one person will know how to fix it.

Currently Can Masdeu is prodding ahead with educational programs, outreach and rehabilitating the compound with the intention of being completely sustainable. Evidence of this dots the land; solar panels, composting toilets, pedal powered washing machine, rainwater catchment tanks, solar showers...

The city of Barcelona has plans to develop the valley, but the project has received international attention and is in a holding pattern at the moment. The project was an inspiration and breath of fresh air during our stay in Barcelona. I will carry this day with me into the urban garden in San Francisco. Thank you Can Masdeu!

Inferus is an independent project of cultural resistance in the public space. The first stage of intervention takes place in the city subway, a territory of cognitive experimentation, a sphere where the perceptual reorganization of spatial and temporal notions among users makes possible the development of a distinct perspective in an appropriative-intention scheme.

The theme for the 2007 IVSA conference is the multi-faceted relationship between public and private realms and how they are shaped by human action while at the same time condition our lives. The aim of the conference is to visually examine the various layers of the public/private relationship. Presenters and panelists are invited to explore how the social is embodied in the built environment, how visual media challenge and/or reinforce the traditional divide between public and private; and alternative frameworks that visual sociology offers for reconstructing this relationship.

infed is an open, independent and not-for-profit site put together by a small group of educators with the aim to provide a space for people to explore A-Z theory and practice of informal education and lifelong learning. They encourage educators to develop ways of working and being that foster association, conversation and relationship.

Browsing the contents of a new acquaintance's bookshelves is a common impulse. I do it all the time, sizing people up, looking for common interests, potential conversation starters, and, I guess, ideas for something to read next. It can take some time to meet all of your acquaintances' bookcases, but on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 an event for public book sharing was held at the Garden for the Environment. The garden is a seventeen-year-old space headed by Blair Randall, and offers the local community resources for growing things. Amy Franceschini, the demonstration garden's first Artist in Residence, initiated the One-Day Library, a social gathering to further interest in urban gardening and related ideas.

A simple bookcase (milk crates and boards) was set up in the garden-- its bare shelves awaiting the arrival of books. Library attendees were invited to bring selections from their personal libraries about urban gardening, food history, art and nature, and related ideas. Together, more than fifty attendees created a new library. It could be assumed that attendees were veritable green thumbs, but hardly a word was traded about how to grow a specific bean. Instead, the majority of talk amongst the artists, educators, and students was about how to encourage gardening, the local politics to support urban gardening, and the wealth of things published in recent history about the matter—topics of conversation that surprisingly don't rule out the participation of those who kill most of what they plant.

The collective library was one of both old gems and current discourse. Some books had been found in garage sales from decades past. University course readers, small press, underground and local publications sat alongside how-to guides, non-fiction paperbacks, essays about biology, mushrooms, and the urban environment. I found my own favorites in a dictionary-style book of pretend locations, and a book of illustrations explaining the world of utilities underneath the street.

The One-Day Library readers paid dues to some other offbeat subjects. Contributors to the library were welcomed to read passages aloud from their books. Those who read shared relevant ideas. A few provocative thoughts go nicely with donated bread, baked goods, tea and a little wine especially on a bright day surrounded by flourishing vegetation. Amy Balkin read a selection from a 1974 children's cookbook shedding light on a long-forgotten dietary supplement promised by the UN to end protein deficiencies worldwide. Seemingly, the supplement called "CSM" never lived up to the language used to triumph its saving powers, and one has to wonder whether writing to the address in the book for a free sample would yield anything at all.

Megan Shaw Prelinger shared her connection to the land via mushroom hunting by reading from David Wolfe's Tales from the Underground. Rick Prelinger also of the Prelinger Archives and Library introduced an educational film from the 50's titled, Our Foster Mother the Cow, allowing younger imaginations to conjure exactly what kind of teaching went along with rural agricultural lesson plans.

The One-Day Library found success in its temporary nature as a public event, for me, because the image of a collective bookcase resonates even though it has already been taken down, and all the books have gone home with their rightful owners. The act of creating a dream library out of both book owners and the books beats the traditional lending library at usefulness and approachability — the indispensable part being people who can talk about the books they brought. Building such a library ultimately works to recognize one's own community as the most necessary resource we have.

The rich and bountiful commons that Californians once enjoyed as a gift of nature and fruit of public efforts are under assault today. Our resources are degraded, our services privatized and our public spaces increasingly pre-empted. But the state’s commons-wealth are not mere amenities for our private lives or raw materials for the economy. They are collective goods, shared resources and collective achievements that underpin our and future generations’ well-being, our civic life and our possibility for a democratic life together.

What exactly are commons? How do they work? How can we protect them? Join scholars, activists, scientists and writers from around the state to examine the crises of California’s commons, recover their history and imagine their possible futures.

"Love Difference is a network of institutions, organisations and individual people who are committed to providing society with a new model of cultural integration through art and creativity. It was established in Biella in Spring 2002 in the Politics Office of the Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto. The aim is to bring together, around the regions facing onto the Mediterranean Sea, people and institutions interested in creating new prospects that reach beyond the tragic conflict between different cultures."

Artivistic is a transdisciplinary three-day gathering on the interPlay between art, information and activism. Artivistic emerges out of the proposition that not only artists should talk about art, academics about theory, and activists about activism.

"Artivistic does not only provide a platform for political artists and artistic activists, but partakes in the very movements that work for change. In the pursuit of temporary moments of pleasure, we move towards freedom, for resistance is perpetual and oppression, ever-changing."

A one-day public library created by artists, gardeners and friends of the Garden for the Environment. Invited, one and all, to bring a selection from your private library to the garden for a one-day only public library. By sharing a selection of your favorite books we will temporarily create a collective dream library. Please bring no more than ten books on the following themes: Urban gardening, art and nature, food history, art/policy/farming, sustainability/self-reliance, future of food, social history of food/gardens.

Liam Gillick presents five thirty minute lectures, followed by drinks in the bar at unitednationsplaza.
May 7 – May 11, 2007
All sessions will start at 7:30 PM

The outline of a possible text. Five parts will be tested and developed, quickly.

Day 1: The day before closure of an experimental factory.
Day 2: Redundancy following the lure of infinite flexibility.
Day 3: Reoccupation, recuperation and aimless renovation.
Day 4: Reconfiguring the recent past.
Day 5: Relations of equivalence – three potential endings.

“The text looks again at the dynamic that exists within a group when one set of people thinks that there will ‘have to be change’ and ‘things won’t be able to continue this way’ and the other believes that change will only occur as a result of direct action.”

"spring_alpha" is a networked game system set in an industrialised council estate whose inhabitants are attempting to create their own autonomous society in contrast to that of the regime in which they live. The game serves as a "sketch pad" for testing out alternative forms of social practice at both the "narrative" level, in terms of the game story, and at a "code" level, as players are able to re-write the code that runs the simulated world. The basic aim of the game is to change the rules by which the society in that world runs. This is done through hacking and altering the code that simulates that world, creating new types of behaviour and social interaction. How effective this becomes depends on the players' ability to spread these new ideas into the society.

Printed Matter presents the exhibition Group Work, together with the launch of a publication by the same name by the Chicago-based artists' collective Temporary Services.

Temporary Services presents their Aesthetic Analysis of Human Groupings, an installation consisting of words and symbols for human groupings, as well as hundreds of photos of social groupings appropriated from books and magazines, displayed throughout the exhibition space.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Group Work, the latest book in Printed Matter's Emerging Artist Publication Series will be launched. Based on a pamphlet published by Temporary Services in 2002 titled Group Work: A Compilation of Quotes About Collaboration from a Variety of Sources and Practices, this publication provides a multitude of perspectives on the theme of Group Work by practitioners of artistic group practice from 1960s to the present.

Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop's project group 'Big Hope' is based on a mutual interest in discussing strategies of engaging with social issues and communicating with a broader public in art. Together they have worked on a number of internationally exhibited, collaborative photographic, video and mapping projects - often involving certain marginalised social groups, as both project participants and audience.

A campaign to stop the transfer of control over the majority of Iraq’s oil over to multinational companies like BP and Shell.
It opposes any foreign exploitation of Iraq's oil reserves that rips off the Iraqi people. Members include Corporate Watch, Iraq Occupation Focus, Jubilee Iraq, Naftana, PLATFORM, Voices UK, and War on Want.

The book is a compilation of texts and projects (not only by superflex) that actualize, exemplify or discuss self-organisation. The counter-economic strategies presented here are alternatives to classical capitalist economic organisation that exploit, or have been produced by, the existing global economic system.

Polar Produce is a multidisciplinary group who create interactive media and live art experiences. Based in Bristol, UK the group's work explores the interface between virtual and real environments with particular emphasis on real-time, site-specific and locative experiences.

My hero's:
Another amazing project/research brought to us by the Arts Council England:

'The New Audiences Website is one of the largest free resources on developing audiences in the world. It offers a great opportunity to learn from our peers and we urge arts professionals to take advantage of its richness.'

New Audiences was set up to encourage as many people as possible, from all backgrounds and every walk of life, to participate in and benefit from the arts.

Just before his death in April 2006 Allan Kaprow assisted on working on this touring exhibition about his collected work, writings, performances and more. Being central to the performance tradition and as well to many relational practices of today, the show is of both historical and contemporary interest.
His book: "Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life" is a central document on thinking about everyday life and many other topics.

The Sharjah Biennial 8 will present various attempts in visual arts and film that address the growing social, political and environmental challenges the world is facing due to excessive urban development, pollution, political ambitions, and the thoughtless misuse, abuse and exhaustion of natural resources.

ATSA is an organism founded in 1997 by artists Pierre Allard and Annie Roy to create urban interventions: installations, performances and realistic stagings bearing witness to the various social and environmental aberrations which preoccupy the two artists. Their works investigate and transform the urban landscape and restore the citizen’s place in the public realm, depicting it as a political space open to discussion and societal debates. ATSA promotes an open, active and responsible vision of artists as citizens contributing to the sustainable development of their society.

A period of dissent and experimentation around the February 2, 2002 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Manhattan (NYC) at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. The global executives and corporate elite attending the annual conference, usually held in Davos Switzerland, carved the streets of New York City into a police state. Meanwhile artists and activist--tactical media practitioners, from around the world created new tools and held workshops intending to send them a clear message: The September 11th attacks will NOT gag the critiques of globalization. This video explores the collaborations and ideas of four collectives working on projects at the WEF protests.

"The Digger Archives is an ongoing Web project to preserve and present the history of the anarchist guerilla street theater group that challenged the emerging Counterculture of the Sixties and whose actions and ideals inspired (and continue to inspire) a generation (of all ages) to create models of Free Association.

The Diggers combined street theater, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing Free Food every day in the Park, and distributing "surplus energy" at a series of Free Stores (where everything was free for the taking.)"

An exhibition and book, "Inventing Kindergarten" at Art Center College of Design.

"...kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design."

National Endowment for the Arts Releases Study on The Arts and Civic Engagement

U.S.

A large population survey is first to find links between arts participation and community health

"People who participate in the arts are people who help make communities thrive, according to a study released today by the National Endowment for the Arts. The study, The Arts and Civic Engagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life, reveals that people who participate in the arts also engage in positive civic and individual activities -- such as volunteering, going to sporting events, and outdoor activities -- at significantly higher rates than non-arts participants. The report shatters the stereotype that art is an escapist or passive activity, showing instead that it is associated with a range of positive behaviors. The study also reveals that young adults (18-34) show a declining rate of arts participation and civic activities.

A wonderful collection of writings that provide a range of theoretical framework for relational art from 1960's to present with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière's influential "Problems and Transformations in Critical Art.

The book also includes central writings by such artists as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Joseph Beuys, Augusto Boal, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. And it features recent critical and curatorial debates, with discussions by Lars Bang Larsen, Nicolas Bourriaud, Hal Foster, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

Brazilian artist and curator Maria Therese Alvez has a ongoing project about ballast from ships and how this lead to global exchange of flora. In short when trade ships returned with an empty load, to maintain stability in the ships they were loaded with ballast most often in the form of soil. Arriving back the ballast was unloaded and in this way a huge exchange of soil and thereby seeds took place along the major trade routes. With great care in researching this she finds the ballasts spots, analyzes the flora present, makes gardens and more.
Alvez also co-founded Brazil's Green Party, something I would also like to know much more about.

'Slightly' different from National Public Radio, this NPR is an independent, artist-run radio project committed to providing an alternative media platform for artists, activists, musicians, and community members.

Since 1957, "In God We Trust" was put on all paper currency in the United States. In the early 1990s, the Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a lawsuit to remove the national motto, but their case was dismissed by a federal judge on the grounds that "In God We Trust" is not a religious phrase.
As a reaction, Mitchell Kahle has been using a red pen or stamp to mark a circle and slash over the word "God" on every bill that passes his way and calculated that his "godless" money must have reached about half-million people by now.

A selection of artists and cultural workers from various geographies speak about their motivations, satisfactions and frustrations with collaborative work. The interviews are available as audio and in written form. A project by Miklos Erhardt.

Miklos is also a member of the group Big Hope with Dominic Hislop & Elske Rosenfeld. The group have done a ray of projects ranging from "Protest Songbook" to Commonopoly - a large scale game like structure.

Rural studio is about architecture that seeks solutions from within communities, and tries to actualize them in collaboration with its residents. You have to dive into the project section of the site to find the rich number of projects done from often local and recycled materials at a low cost.

The Seminar with Martha Rosler takes place in the context of unitednationsplaza December 10–15, 2006
It explores the media history of the 60'ties and 70'ties which offered the hope of social transformation through art, activism, and community interventions. The seminar deals with what kind of issues and moments can be adapted for visionary impulses in current video art.

unitednationsplaza is exhibition as school. Structured as a seminar/residency program in the city of Berlin, it will involve collaboration with approximately 60 artists, writers, theorists and a wide range of audiences for a period of one year. In the tradition of Free Universities, most of its events will be open to all those interested to take part.

Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom are current in residence in Copenhagen and have a project in process going, a part of it is: "The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let's Re-Make the World" - "a library of how-to books from the counter culture of the late 60s/early 70s as well as their own projects and investigations in relation to the groundswell of oppositional living that happened then." A small Pdf publication can be downloaded freely.

The “Lost Highway Expedition” was initiated by the School of Missing Studies [SMS].
LHE is the first event of Europe Lost and Found (ELF), a multi annual and three-phased project, involving following major themes: “Balkanization” (2006-2007), “Europeanization” (2007-2008) and “Map the Future” (2008-2009). Each project phase will build the base for the next one, thus posing new set of questions and determining new research directions. In this way, it will reflect on contemporary Europe, which it understands as a cycle of continuously reshaping social, political, economic and urban conditions and communication processes. However, each phase is planned to realize an expedition, an exhibition and a publication.

"The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 has set a cut-off date of 1 January 2026, when all footpaths and bridleways that existed prior to 1949 and are not on the definitive map, will be extinguished and have all public rights removed."!!

This is just one fascinating item to be found, along with other interesting news and articles about Common Land and public rights of way in the English countyside.

LIMINAL SPACES/ grenzraeume originated from an initiative of individual Palestinian and Israeli artists united in their opposition to the destructive dynamics and ever growing hardship and deprivation of basic civil and political rights endured by Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

An unprecedented network of artists, curators and cultural producers emerged, meeting often under difficult circumstances, despite the harsh context of ever increasing violence and the complete collapse of the political peace process.

Temescal Amity Works is a two-year project by Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves (editor of: "What we want is free"), sited in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, where they also live. They maintain a storefront, a series of free publications, a website and a crop-sharing program. The projects considers how existing models of local collectivism and exchange both personal and economic can be extended into aestetic practices and how these can feed back into and layer a site and a community.

The People Speak develops ideas, technologies and strategies for bringing people together to have conversations and discussions in an open-ended and fun way. We design events, architectures, systems and processes in which people are encouraged to express themselves, share ideas, flirt, and be as creative as they can.
Projects include the now long running "Dicshunary" that "aims to provide a home for all the small, endangered werds that might only exist in the language of one neighbourhood, one family or even one person."

Reunion is an action research, contemporary visual arts project that has emerged from a secession of projects by Sophie Hope and Sarah Carrington through their curatorial partnership B+B. Reunion is a two year project consisting of research, meetings, residencies and exhibitions that try out ideas and reflect on what it means to be political as a cultural producer in Europe today.

The project intersects with recent public debate in Copenhagen about air pollution in the city. In collaboration with Senior Scientist Jørgen Brandt from The National Environmental Research Institute in Denmark a first prototype is developed for making an indicator that can be placed in the city and display local levels of pollution as well as pollution forecasts on individual streets. The project holds an open source script for displaying data from the Internet in a variety of forms.